BeBe Zahara Benet still gets a familiar nickname wherever she goes. Just a few days ago, the drag queen and inaugural winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race was at the airport when she heard it again, bellowed from across the room.

“I was going to catch my connecting flight and somebody just screams ‘Cameroon!’ ” she tells Vanity Fair with a laugh. “It’s almost like they don’t even know my name anymore.”

Benet (real name: Nea Marshall Kudi Ngwa) was born and raised in Cameroon. Her home country quickly became something of a title for her during the show’s first season, back in 2009. The series would soon become a reality-TV phenomenon, one that has brought drag culture to the mainstream and catapulted the careers of 100 drag queens. Its ninth season premiere is set to air this Friday, with an apex guest appearance from Lady Gaga.

Back in ’09, Drag Race’s success was more of a question mark than an exclamation point. “It was kind of risky,” Benet recalls. “There wasn’t a show out there like that.”

The formula—take a group of drag queens with larger-than-life personalities, put them through a series of hurdles, and challenge them to design sickening runway looks—proved to be juicy and winning, not least because of the competitors’ vulnerability. Contestants were often prodded to share their deepest secrets, a thread that has carried over into every subsequent season.

“There was just a lot of heart in the show,” Benet says. “Me talking about H.I.V. in Africa, in Cameroon. Ongina talking about her own difficulty coming out about AIDS. Shannel talking about being overweight and how she had to overcome that . . . there was so much heart. I don’t know if I see that much with the other seasons.”

In that first season, Benet was a standout, known for her poise, polished looks, and fierce runway walk. And like any good queen, she feels strongly that Season 1 was easily the show’s best—if only more queens were able to watch it. Those inaugural episodes have been dubbed “The Lost Season” by fans; they’re nearly impossible to find alongside other episodes on platforms like Amazon, and only a handful of installments can be streamed on Logo’s site. That scarcity has made it more difficult for Season 1 queens to build their careers, Benet says: “You don’t see a lot of the Season 1 girls working, because a lot of the fans don’t even know [them]. It’s just so sad that a lot of people don’t still know who we are. It really is sad.”

Typically, appearing on Drag Race has been a stamp of approval for a queen, a mainstream introduction to fans of the art form. Drag culture also heavily relies on references, and the world of RuPaul’s Drag Race is highly self-referential, with queens constantly name-checking contestants and winners of seasons past. But most Season 1 queens are left out of the fun, save for stars like Benet, Ongina, and Akashia—mainly because the latter’s fall during a runway challenge was an instantly gif-able moment.

“There’s just something beautiful about how unique it was and how everybody was very authentic,” Benet says of Drag Race Season 1. “There wasn’t any blueprints to follow, so you just had to make your own.”

Of course, Benet can also poke fun at the first season’s famously low-budget aesthetic and oft-mocked camera quality (“I think Vaseline was a sponsor that season,” former Season 2 and 3 contestant Shangela once joked).

“I kind of look at the current seasons and I look at when we started, and I’m like, Oh my gosh!” Benet says with a laugh.

Benet, who often says the show gave her a “platform” rather than a career, spent her $20,000 Season 1 winnings on a variety of things, but mainly charity and artistic projects. She also would have taken advantage of the lifetime supply of MAC products she was supposedly promised . . . if she had ever received it. “I was supposed to,” she says, chuckling. “We’re gonna leave it at that.”

[Update: Representatives for the show tell Vanity Fair that a lifetime MAC supply was not part of Benet’s original prize package, and that she received everything else in the initial package.]

These days, Benet has moved out of New York City and is living in Minneapolis with family. She just finished shooting a new music video for her upcoming single, and is preparing to tour in April to promote the new music.

She also keeps in touch with RuPaul (who’s been “like a mentor to me”) and her fellow Season 1 stars, as well as younger stars like Season 8 winner Bob the Drag Queen, who reached out to her before his stint on the show. “Bob was like, ‘Ever since I saw you on Drag Race, I was inspired to do it and be on the show,’ ” Benet recalls. “‘Bebe is an inspiration so I can do it,’ you know?”